On March 25, 1931, Illinois and the nation, mourned the loss of suffragist and civil rights icon Ida B. Wells. But before she became a leader in the fight for women's rights, Wells came to national attention as a crusader against lynchings of African Americans in the South.
Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi during the Civil War. She later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she worked as a schoolteacher and journalist. She became a pioneer of investigative journalism, risking her life to uncover the stories behind several lynchings. When she published an anti-lynching editorial in 1892 in "The Memphis Free Speech and Headlight" — a paper she co-owned — a white mob ransacked and destroyed the paper's office.
Wells never returned to Memphis. She became a sought-after speaker and traveled across the northern states and Europe, speaking about racism, lynching and equal rights. She eventually settled in Chicago, where she and her husband, civil rights advocate Ferdinand Barnett, published the "Chicago Conservator."
As a woman, Wells was often excluded from male-dominated activist meetings, leading her to expand her work into women’s rights, particularly the right to vote. When some women's rights groups excluded her because she was Black, she founded organizations for Black women. Her editorials criticizing the Women's Christian Temperance Movement helped push the group in 1895 to take a public stance against lynching.
Wells was also a founding member of the NAACP. Today, journalism awards, schools, streets and other landmarks bear her name.
In 2020, the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, Wells was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for "her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."
Copy Edited by Eryn Lent
